Episode 20: Adventures in Paleomimicry and Analog Astronaut Missions with Nathan Pili

Written by Emily Olsen

Join Emily and Alexa as they chat with Nathan Pili, a scientist and analog astronaut from the UK and Italy. He did his undergrad and master's in physics, but followed a peculiar route toward a PhD in aerospace paleomimicry. In his day-to-day, Nathan scans fossils to look for evolutionary adaptations that might help make better engineering components. Listen in to hear about this fascinating work as well as Nathan’s involvement in the analog astronaut community, where he takes part in missions such as the Asclepios program and the upcoming AMADEE-27 to progress understanding of humans in extreme environments. 

Show Notes:


Flying Reptiles & Dinosaurs

Films

Books

Transcript

[intro music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily

Hello and welcome to the Art Astra Podcast. I'm Emily Olsen.

Alexa

I'm Alexa Erdogan.

Emily

And today we have a wonderful guest with us. Nathan Pili is a 25-year-old from the UK and Italy.

He did his undergrad and master's in physics, but followed a peculiar route toward a PhD in aerospace paleomimicry. In his day-to-day, Nathan scans fossils to look for evolutionary adaptations that might help make better engineering components. In his free time, Nathan thoroughly enjoys playing tabletop role-playing games like D&D, as well as a range of board games. He loves going to climbing gyms and doing martial arts. When the opportunity arises, he also actively engages in the analog astronaut community, taking part in missions to progress understanding of humans in extreme environments. Nathan, thanks so much for joining us!

Welcome to the show.

Alexa

Welcome.

Nathan Pili

Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm excited to see you guys.

Alexa

Likewise. So I guess the biggest question right off the bat is how did this career path even start for you? How did you end up in the field of paleomimicry, and what even is paleomimicry, and then aerospace applications as well?

Nathan Pili

It's actually kind of a funny story because it is completely untraditional as well. I did, like you said, I did my undergrad and master's in physics. And I followed this route of doing X-rays and got pretty decent scanning things using X-rays. I had a great mentor. And one day my mentor says, “Go for a coffee with this guy.”

I'm thinking, “OK, where's this going?” And so I go for a coffee with my now supervisor, Phil Manning, who starts talking about dinosaurs and stuff, right?And this is completely, I was not warned about “this guy is going to talk to you about dinosaurs.” And so we go for a coffee and he's talking about the mechanics of dinosaurs and the material science of dinosaurs.

And I'm like, “This is super interesting.” Clearly, I showed enough enthusiasm because the next day, my X-ray, like my X-ray mentors said, “Oh, so do you want the PhD or not?”

And I'm like, “what?” It was a stealth… I'd be taken by surprise, it was a stealth PhD interview.

And so yeah, just kind of, I want to say I stumbled into it through the direction of X-ray CT because that's, you know, how you do all of your analysis in that field.

And so yeah, now I study, because they're really interested in at the moment, pterodactyls, pterosaurs, because pterosaurs were around for 150-odd million years. So it turns out that's a lot of time, a lot of time to perfect the art of flying. And so we, you know, look for inside of their bones, their microstructure, the material properties to see if we can make better airplane components based off pterodactyls.

Alexa

That's super cool. So Paleomimicry is sort of like biomimicry using like dinosaur fossils and things like that. 

Nathan Pili

Using specifically fossils, yeah, because our go-to statistic is that all of the life currently around today, all extant organisms, only make up less than 1% of all life that has ever existed in terms of biodiversity, which means that 99 plus percent of life and microstructure and things that we can take inspiration from is sitting in the fossil record unexplored. Because of course, extant creatures– you have the added benefit of them being alive and you can look at how they move, etc. But there's just such a wealth of information that is lying in fossils that until now, especially as a kid, you get told, “Dinosaurs are cool to study, but they have no real world applications.”

So it's really cool nowadays being able to go to schools for like, it was like British Science Week a few weeks ago and talk to them about the, I don't say the practical uses of dinosaurs, but that there's a renewed interest in fossils these days.

Alexa

That's so cool. And what a…What a wild time to be alive where you have, we have the technology and we have the human interest to do such a thing. Also as part of your journey towards paleomimicry, like aerospace paleomimicry, I believe that also took you towards an internship at the European Space Agency. Is that correct?

Nathan Pili

Yes, yeah, that was a crazy moment, a crazy few months in Cologne, which was biomimicry-related. It was actually completely separate because I was doing my masters, applied for an internship at ESA, and they were really interested in radiation protection.

And because I'd done a bunch of particle physics shenanigans as part of my physics background. And so they were really interested in me running radiation simulations.

And when I got there and started chatting to the team, they were using fungi, like a special type of fungus called a radiotrophic fungus, which is something they found in the Chernobyl reactor that absorbs radiation and turns it into an energy source.

Really crazy thing that nature pulled off, by the way. You know, we have a nuclear disaster.

Nature is like, “Hey, let me eat that up. You know, that's free energy.”

[laughs]

And so what ESA is currently looking at is designing radiation protection for spaceships and moon habitats, Mars habitats, using this type of fungus, which is so cool.

And I was glad to be a part of that while I was there, but then just came back and cracked on with the dinosaur stuff.

Emily

That's amazing. Also, when you were talking about like the renewed interest in fossils right now, I mean, it's so cool that they're constantly discovering new fossils and also like recalibrating what our views are of certain species. Like just recently, I think in February, it was announced that I was… I remember texting Alexa about it. I was in a wildly different time zone of like, “Wake up, new specimen or new species of Allosaurus just dropped.” 

Nathan Pili

[laughs] Yeah.

Emily

Allosaurus mirabilis, it's truly just so cool. But what has been the most fascinating part of this field for you so far?

Nathan Pili

Oh, the most fascinating part of this field so far is the fact that to learn how much information is preserved in fossils, because you see fossils and visually you can see from their structure that the macroscopic… like the morphology, the shape of the bone is preserved, right? That's how we know what dinosaurs look like. The crazy thing to me that I discovered is that it's not only the shape of the bone that's preserved, but also the chemical information and the microstructural information. Like one of the biggest things we found was the blood vessels– sorry, the cavities left behind by the blood vessels– in the pterosaur bone, which is so cool. [laughs] Like, you know, the fact that we know the shape and size and dynamics and the mechanics of the blood vessels in something that died 100 million years ago! That's crazy to me.

Alexa

It feels very much like dinosaur sleuthing in a way.

Nathan Pili

Yeah.

Alexa

…like looking for all these little clues that nature has been so kind to leave behind for us and then turning them into puzzle pieces to fit into a puzzle. We didn't even think was something that existed in the first place.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, It's also interesting because you've, we don't have the full picture, like the probability of fossils forming perfectly and the conditions needed for fossilization is so specific that it is very likely we're missing hundreds of thousands of species that by chance just didn't die in a lake.

It turns into a survivorship bias type thing, right? Our perception of the ancient world is only established and determined by what fossils we find. But obviously the fossils we find are only determined by the places that are perfect conditions for fossilization, which means that if the geology isn't right in the specific region that a certain species existed, we'll never know that species existed, which is, you know, why it's so great when we do find new specimens because we're like, “Oh, this is a new insight into a problem we already have.”

Alexa

As part of this, I'm curious, you speak about this field with so much passion. I assume you have to have a favorite dinosaur or multiple favorite dinosaurs.

Nathan Pili

So this is the thing. I was always the space kid. I was never the dinosaur kid. But coming into it, I've learned a great many range of dinosaurs. Annoyingly, technically, and I have to say this legally, otherwise my supervisor would kill me: pterosaurs… Pterodactyls aren't dinosaurs, right? They're as related to dinosaurs as they are, as dinosaurs are to crocodiles, a different part of the family tree. I'd have to go with… my favorite dinosaurs are Diplodocus, but if we're going for favorite fossil, it's got to be the Anurognathus, which is a tiny little pterodactyl that was almost like bat-shaped. And they are the cutest little guys from reconstructions. They're kind of like hairy, fluffy little bat-like pterosaurs. So really cool guys. They were still insect eaters when most pterosaurs in the Cretaceous period had moved on to eating larger creatures.

Emily

That's so cool. Are there many specimens of those available in public institutions?

Nathan Pili

In China, yes. The most of the Anurognathus. I think it's super interesting because places that have a lot of just surface area like Brazil and the US and China just have significantly more fossils because there's more land to find them, right? Some of the best preserved fossils in the world are in Brazil. Brazil has super tight restrictions on exportation of fossils as well, because there was a lot of unethical stealing of fossils in the 20th century. So Brazil is justifiably, because of how great their fossils are, very protective of them. Same goes for China. They're quite protective of their specimens.

And so one day I might get my hands on one of these Anurognathus specimens, but they're… You know, it's the same with like the Quetzalcoatlus, you know, like the big one that you see in Jurassic World and stuff. The Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of 12 meters long. They don't just like, let you take that across overseas, you know?

Emily

Understandably, yeah. Mongolia is the same way as well. 

Nathan Pili

Mm! Yeah, exactly. 

Emily

That they have some really, really cool specimens, but they also have a history of unethical export having happened to their specimens. 

Nathan Pili

Yeah, there's a really long list of that kind of stuff happening. So it's really important in this field to be aware of the fossils you're collecting, the ethics behind the fossils you're collecting, when you read a new paper published in a journal, you make sure that they– for example, amber, if you see research involving amber, there's not a lot of… especially like Myanmar amber, Myanmarese amber, is a lot of unethical ways that stuff has been treated and found.

So it provides an extra dimension to it. When you're a pure physicist, there's no ethical considerations for particles. [laughs] So it was interesting learning about this new dimension of research.

Emily

Yeah. So you've mentioned that you were more of a space kid and then fell into dinosaurs. I have a two-part question of would you ever want to be an astronaut and have you thought about finding fossils on other planets?

Nathan Pili

Yes and yes. I feel like, as a space kid, it's kind of like your prerogative that you try to be an astronaut, right? [laughs] And I think that would be, that's my, that's my specific niche, right?

Maybe that's the dream is that, you know, they find something that upends science on Mars and they're like, “We need somebody who's really good at like imaging fossils.” And I'm like, “Me, hello, me, I can do that. [laughs] Send me to Mars and let me image fossils because that would be…yeah, that would be awesome.” I mean, incredibly unlikely that we find fossils on Mars, like proper traditional fossils, if you will, other than like microbiology. But that would be really cool.

Emily

Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the differences in geology and gravity of different, especially like exoplanets–how differences in gravity and geology might make for differences in like fossil material and how things fossilize, because it would just be so different. So honestly, obviously like here on Earth, there is Gnatalie, I don't know if you saw in the news, it was like last year maybe? But it's a Diplodocus-like dinosaur. I believe it was found in Utah, but it is the first green fossil, or at least so the museum in LA says. But it's the most colorful and most complete long-necked dinosaur on the West Coast. But it is a composite. It's because of a celadonite in the mineral process, it is a green fossil.

And it's named Gnatalie because I think they'd put it to a public…

Nathan

[laughs]

Emily

….competition to come up with a name. And it's “GNatalie” with a G. 

Nathan

Like Boaty McBoatface.

Emily

Yeah, exactly. They're very lucky they didn't end up with a Boaty McBoatface situation.

Alexa

I was going to say! [laughs]

Emily

 “Boaty McBoatface, the dinosaur fossil.”

Nathan Pili

The Diplodocus,yeah. “Diplody McDiplody.”

Emily

But it's named Natalie with G in the name because of the gnats from the dig site, apparently.

Nathan Pili

Oh! right. Like GNatalie. Yeah.

Alexa

Oh! I was like, “where's the G?”

Nathan Pili

Yeah, that's what I was saying. I was like, “Natalighie?”

[laughter] 

Emily

But yeah.

Nathan Pili

That's …that whole idea that because you know fossilization probably isn't a requirement for human life, right? Which means that human…it's a pure coincidence. Because I like to think about these things sometimes, about like how certain things aren't coincidences. They're just required for human life. Like you think about the charge on a proton and electron being identical or opposite. That's not a coincidence, because if it wasn't like that, we wouldn't exist to ask the question, “why are they like that?”

And I like to think about this a lot. And that applies to fossils, right? Like there are two absolutes. Either fossilization is a requirement for human life or it's just a coincidence that in a cosmic level coincidence that animals that died hundreds of millions of years ago are perfectly preserved for us to look at. And I think that's so cool. When you think about it, we would never know about all of these species if fossilization wasn't a thing. It's a pure coincidence.

Emily

Yes, absolutely! And I just also love the stories of how they were first discovered. Of just, could you imagine being the first person to discover a triceratops skull, for example? Of just like, “what is this?”

Nathan Pili

Especially a triceratops skull. Have you guys ever seen one in person before?

Alexa

Emily has. 

Emily

Yeah.

Nathan Pili

They're just great. They're like 3 tons or something stupid. They're just monumental. You look at it and you're like, “There's no way that's a real…” Triceratops skulls look like they're trying to convince you that triceratops were looked like that. You know, it's like a bad caricature. [laughs] It's like, it's like asparagus. I don't know if you've ever seen asparagus in the wild.

Alexa

Yeah! 

Nathan

But it just grows, it's just like an asparagus, a single asparagus will just grow out of the ground. It doesn't like grow on a bush or like with any other system. It's just a single asparagus. It looks like somebody's tricked you into thinking that's how asparagus grows.

Alexa

Yeah! 

Emily

Sounds fake. 

Alexa

Someone's about to pop out of the bush and be like, “I pranked you on asparagus.”

[laughter] 

Nathan Pili

Yeah, exactly.

Emily

But I love in the, just like the balance of the group chat of like, I've seen the triceratops and Alexa has seen the asparagus. 

Nathan

Yeah, exactly. Like, I've got to a museum. I've seen wild asparagus.

Alexa

We both… we've all seen some things in different niches.

Nathan Pili

Yes, yeah, exactly.

Emily

So we've talked about your academic trajectory and in your bio that you worked in or have been involved in extreme environments. Can you tell us about your time as an analog astronaut?

Nathan Pili

Yeah, absolutely. So I was part of the, I was one of the analog astronauts for the Asclepios 5 mission. Asclepios is a international student-run, (you know, run by students for students) organization that manages to pull off a whole analog mission every year, even though we're all students juggling other responsibilities, which was a lot of fun to be part of, especially as an analog astronaut, because it meant that I basically spent three weeks locked up in a Swiss bunker pretending I was on the moon, which sounds like some people might say that sounds crazy because it was. No sunlight for three weeks was certainly a challenge. And our only contact with the outside world was mission control. So it was, we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. But it was such a crazy experience because we got to do so many cool experiments. We got to explore so many facets of isolation. And yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Emily

When was the mission? Because I'm just wondering how your approach to preparing for that mission changed if it was before or after the pandemic or if weathering the pandemic might have helped prepare you for that.

Nathan Pili

Oh, this mission was only last year. In July, August last year. So the yeah, the pandemic was definitely…I was a student at the time during the pandemic, so I basically just did nothing and sat around and played video games. And on the other hand, we have this, where we were basically working constantly in the base doing science experiments, going on EVAs, that kind of thing.

Emily

What do you wish more people knew or asked you about the Asclepios mission or analog astronaut programs in general?

Nathan Pili

The experience of the crew bonding. I wish more people asked me about how close we got with each other as crew. Because of course, everybody wants to know about the science experiments and our own personal experience of being like, what was it like going in and then leaving and, experiencing the outside world for the first time in three weeks. But the thing that I love talking about is my crew, because they became lifelong friends. We trained together for a year on and off on different weekends. 

And we just grew so close, it was fantastic. And because it's an international organization, like my trio, because we were split, we were a crew of nine split into 3 expeditions. My expedition was myself, UK and Italy. There was Mateus who is from Brazil but lives in France. And then there was Alina who is from the US. And the three of us, despite from being from different corners of the world, all were locked together in a room and got to find out so much about each other. 

And we almost developed our own little culture. You know, you develop such intense inside jokes when you're in isolation for three weeks. And so then you leave and we all go back to our corners of the world and then there's nobody to make the inside jokes with. And you're like, “No! Who's going to laugh at my jokes that nobody would even begin to understand because they've not lived inside a Swiss bunker?”

[laughter]

Alexa

I think that's such a great point that you highlight community, because I would agree with you. I think  a lot of people focus on the scientific applications of analog astronaut experiences and even from a sociological perspective, like the microcultures. But I think it's something distinct to talk about the actual community that forms between people. And I'd be interested to hear, after such an intimate experience developing your own sort of micro community with these people, has that shifted or affected your perspective of community in general or even specifically within the space industry?

Nathan Pili

I think it taught me a lot about how we're going to have to design a Mars mission. I know NASA obviously just announced the aim to put a nuclear powered… an efficient powered rocket in space by 2028, which good luck to them. That's a risky move. But I have friends in the nuclear industry and they said that it's been a sort of ongoing thing in the background. So it'd be cool if they could pull it off. But I don't think we're ready as a species to send people. I don't think we're quote unquote mature enough as a species to send people to Mars yet, because the dynamics of developing a crew culture is fine for a few weeks. But when you're talking about a 10 month trip there, spending however much time you want on Mars and then 10 months back, you're looking at a minimum of three years, right, for the whole trip, whatnot. 

And what we realized is the best thing about being split into groups of three within the whole crew of nine was that we developed mini crews amongst the bigger crew. So if we felt like, we were a bit overwhelmed with other expeditions, we could just retreat back and hang out ourselves. Because the more people you start adding to a crew, you increase the chance of conflict, right? The probability that you don't get along with two people within your own expedition is low, but the probability that you have disagreements with eight other people? It’s non-zero, which I realized very quickly because we were Expedition One. We were the first ones in. We were there the full duration, but Expedition Two and Three alternated for the first half and then the second half. And it brought up this idea of crew change, which I think was really cool. There's one of the experiments was basically seeing, you know, studying the effects of crew change.

And it made me realize that, because one day there was all nine of us in the base at once. And that was a hectic day. It taught me a lot about… because when we go to Mars, you're going to want to take specialists and people that know what they're doing. You know, you want to take construction engineers, if they're, you know, especially we're building habitats and whatever, you're going to want to take all sorts of experts, but you're also going to need experts that don't disagree with each other constantly and don't have constant conflict.

And so, we were, nobody's ever, you're never going to be able to have a perfect crew. Like I love my teammates, but there were times when you were like, “Come on guys, like tidy up after yourselves, that kind of thing.” [laughter] Which we're all guilty of at times, especially when you're put under the pressures of isolation. And so I'm intrigued to see where the social dynamics of creating a crew, creating a culture, which is why analog missions are so important, I think. because we don't fully understand how crew dynamics works on longer time scales with completely different people.

Alexa

Yeah, I would agree. That's a really good point. And I think also that something that came to mind when you were talking about that too is, you know, the crew culture, the crew community, but also the relationship between a deployed crew and mission control, like that is its own like Venn diagram connection of community. And in the past historically, that has been a point of contention sometimes where people on the ground are like, “You don't really understand what it's like to be here sweating in these suits, doing this stuff.” And they think mission control is like, “Oh, it's easy! Just do this.” I feel like that's something that's sort of difficult to train for. And my train of thought is similar along the lines of yours in the sense of like, I think we would need to really mature in that aspect, too, especially for such a long distance mission, to have effective comms with a crew on Mars, for example.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, well, this is a point I'm really intrigued about because of the limitation of the speed of light. It averages to about a 10 minute time delay between Mars and Earth in terms of communications. But obviously that's maximized because it's not an instant response, right? You get that information after 10 minutes and then you have to think and do whatever. I think a mission on the moon, like a long-term mission on the moon, is going to have more problems with mission control than a Mars mission. Because I think the Mars mission is going to have to be a whole lot more independent because they've got a 10 minute time delay. 

Because if there's an emergency, you can't rely on being like, “Hey, Ground Control, we've got this exact problem. Can you find the expert that can solve our problem?” Which is what you do on the ISS at the moment, or if you would have the moon, because the moon is only like, what, a four second time delay. The astronauts, which again comes to that addition of, you know, you want to send experts in many fields to Mars, but the more you increase the crew count, the more chance there is for conflict and crew dynamics to evolve. And you have to consider all of these things. And that crew is going to have to be larger because they're not going to be able to be like, “Hey, Ground Control, solve all our problems,” which honestly, when we were in the base, it was the thing we learned the most in isolation is that if you have a problem, you just call Ground Control and they solve your problem for you. [laughter]

Emily

That would sound convenient if not for the massive isolation factor.

[laughter] 

Nathan Pili

Yeah, exactly.

Emily

Going off of what you've said regarding whether or not we're ready for human life so far away from everything and so isolated with your specific crew, it reminded me of the National Air and Space Museum here in the United States in Washington, DC. They just recently opened a new exhibition called Futures of Human Life in Space. I think it's just called Futures. But actually one of our previous guests, Dr. Sian Proctor, I think we mentioned it in that podcast because her spacesuit is in that exhibition. But there's also a video featuring her and her analog astronaut work and Jordan Bimm and some other analog astronauts talking about what it is like in an analog astronaut environment.

And I thought that the video did such a wonderful job storytelling because it was talking about what it's like to celebrate your birthday in isolation with the specific crew that is probably not your family. They're probably essentially co-workers in this extremely high isolation environment and you're cut off from everything and what it's like, you've alluded to it before of like the in-jokes and the culture, but I wanted to flag that that's an additional resource in a museum environment where it's very much something that culturally we're moving towards, to your point of just the study of what that would be like before we go do that on Mars or another celestial body.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up because we had two birthdays on the mission which is… I still find weird that in a three-week period across a 52-week year, we had two birthdays of nine people. So it was a, but it was a lot of fun. Obviously, we'd trained together for a year. So we were, I'd say we were closer to family than co-workers. Because I know a lot of analog missions don't train for years together. And so I was super fortunate to have this experience with these guys. And the beauty of it was that we'd got in touch with each other before getting there and had prepared like surprises and stuff. We couldn't bring a candle in there for obvious reasons. And so we just got a really powerful torch and then pretended to blow out the candle with a torch. Again, it's these in jokes where you're like, “Man, got to blow up the torch” is not something anybody would get otherwise.

And we just had lots of different family-isms, I would say, when you're celebrating stuff like birthdays. Yeah, we brought the nationality flags of the people who were in there. And so we used their flag as the dining table cloth and had like a proper sit down meal where everybody was like getting together. It was really nice. I really enjoyed it.

Alexa

That sounds so lovely. One thing, too, that caught my attention when you were talking about your analog astronaut experience was the term “specialist.” And it reminds me of, you know, we were listening to your Asclepios podcast episode, and I really love the part where you mention, the famous saying, “jack of all trades, master of none.” But how that phrase really ends is “still better than a master of one.” And I think it's a really interesting conversation about generalists versus specialists. and what that balance might look like in the actual space industry here on Earth, but then also eventually in the stars.

And I'd be curious to hear your perspective, based off of your analog experience, do you see it being more of a balance between generalists and specialists? Do you think that anybody going to space really has to be a generalist in some way, like have a specialized niche, but still be pretty interdisciplinary?

Nathan Pili

I would say you must be interdisciplinary, right? While we all had our roles in the base, some problems just have to be shared. 

For example, on EVA, my go-to moment was when we were doing a mock EVA injury. We weren't getting told about this, which is kind of the fun part about it. Well, it wasn't fun because initially we thought there was an actual injury. We were like, “Oh my God.”

But then ground control weren’t freaking out. And then we were like, “Hmmm kind of suspicious.” Because we've been told that Pedro had injured his leg. And apparently he was really in pain.

[laughs] And so there were two people out on EVA. It was Vic and Pedro out on EVA. And so they were radioing to us like, “Oh, I can't carry,” like Vic was saying, “I can't carry Pedro myself.” And so we were like, “Oh, no, that means we're going to have to send out two EVA teams at the same time,” which meant that there were four astronauts out of the base and it was just me as comms officer and Max as medical officer during that emergency scenario. 

The part where these interdisciplinary grounding, I guess, comes in was that it meant that me and Max had to fight fires for both– for what obviously those guys were on EVA and were trying to get Pedro back. But then we were bombarded with other problems by Mission Control saying, “Oh, there's like solar activity interfering with the communications.”

And we were like, “Whoa.” It was such a cool simulation. I've thoroughly enjoyed this specific emergency scenario. And so we had to, between me and Max, we had to solve problems on the fly as they came. And I think a massive part of that was our interdisciplinary background. I do think that you're going to need people that are good generalists at doing a multitude of tasks.

But when we go to Mars and want to grow crops long term, you can't just send somebody that's a generalist that like did a spot of gardening. [laughs] You want a flipping farmer, you know, like somebody that is well versed in growing crops and rotation of crops and that kind of thing. So I think certain roles absolutely need a specialist, but I think everybody should be well grounded in basic electronics skills and basic first aid, that kind of thing.

Alexa

That absolutely tracks. It's like you have to have the knowledge to be able to survive and support everybody on the team in the context of like a space mission. And then you have your specialist role that you can apply once you're on the ground, so to speak. 

Another thing actually that you brought up on the Asclepios podcast, which we found really interesting too, was you sort of mentioned the similarities of the analog astronaut experience to communal storytelling and story building. And I would love to hear a little bit more about that.

Nathan Pili

Absolutely. I am a do or die. As much as science is my passion, [chuckles] I am very much a do or die storyteller. I go to the cinema twice a week. I write stories for my D&D party, all this kind of stuff, lots of world building. And I mirror that in the analog astronaut space, because in order to immerse yourself, you have to buy into the story that you're on the Moon, right? [laughs] You know in your actual consciousness that I could just go on the Wi-Fi right now and find out what's going on. Or I could Google the solution to my problems. But you have to buy into that immersion of, “No, I need to contact Ground Control. Ground Control will figure it out.” That kind of thing. Which really became obvious in the emergency scenarios, because in the emergency scenarios, like an astronaut being injured on EVA.

And on my final EVA, we were told that there was micrometeorites that had damaged our radio equipment, so couldn't communicate with each other face to face. And so for the rest of that EVA, we just use hand signals which introduced a new problem. And that had this element of storytelling because it immediately then fed back into the science experiment, because then you know how astronauts are going to behave if they no longer have access to certain amenities and certain equipment. And I don't think truly… I don't think you get that experience if you're not immersed. You don't get that authentic reaction to emergencies if you're not immersed in the fantasy of it, if you will.

Emily

That's an excellent point because they can troubleshoot and predict problems, but it's the human behavior element of it that's going to be such an unknown variable.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, absolutely. The part I find interesting about this is that it's so unpredictable, right?

It's interesting to look at the non-fatal emergency situations in space because it's a bit morbid if you start looking to the fatal emergencies in space, but if you look at the non-fatal ones, oh my God, they make for such great stories.

I think it was Skylab 2, one of the first US space stations. I forget the full extent of the story, but basically there was something going wrong. The space station was heating up and they found the best solution was to just deploy a tarp and physically block the sun from getting in. 

And there's a wide range of emergencies in space that you can't prepare for. It's the age-old adage “no plan survives contact with the enemy” where no matter how well you prepare, there's always going to be some unforeseeable event, which is why I think, again, why analog missions are super important, because if there is an accident that we can have logged when astronauts go to Mars, for example. If you get a transmission from Mars 10 minutes ago, “We have this emergency. We need the quickest response.”

If you've already had that emergency, in an analog environment, you can immediately just be, or indeed even better, you can have that stored locally with them and they can look up the solution to their own problems. If you have a database of analog information on that Mars mission, you can just look through and be like, “Oh, they've already counted for this. This is how we solve this problem.”

Emily

Yes, absolutely. I am so excited that you mentioned that because we actually talked to Herb Baker for our podcast because he worked at NASA for a very long time, but it is Skylab 2 because his mom was the seamstress who made the parasol.

[laughs]

Nathan Pili

And also, yeah, it's a crazy story.

Alexa

How wild. 

Emily

It's all connected because, so Herb talked to us about his NASA career, but he's also super involved in community theater. And it's just really cool how there are so many different interdisciplinary connections not only in space, as we've talked about, but also in the space community at large. And then also tying back to dinosaurs…

I've joked to Alexa that I've brought up this book so many different times, but there's a book called Placing Outer Space, and it's about how exoplanet scientists…the tools they use to help people imagine the worlds they're talking about. 

Nathan Pili

Mmm, yeah. 

Emily

And there's definitely a storytelling aspect to that in terms of how we approach imagining a future life in space for humanity at all. But there are some shades of that in paleontology and science communication around paleontology because we're asking people to imagine, to conceive of this world as it was millions and millions and millions of years ago. So it's all connected.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's all connected, especially when you're working with the general public. Nobody wants to read the equivalent of a Wikipedia article unless you're super interested in it, right?

If you can be sold a story about like an exoplanet where it rains diamonds and there's mountains of glass and all of this like extreme stuff helps evoke emotions. The general public can feel like they're there. They can visualize, “Oh my goodness, they found this exoplanet where the rivers are made of honey” or something weird like that. If you can tell a story to the general public, they absorb it so much better. 

Same with the dinosaurs. Very, very, very, very, very, very unlikely that we'll ever know what dinosaurs actually looked like.

It's all just an artist's interpretation and interpretation of data and translating that data into a digestible visual medium, I think is a complete skill in of itself.

Emily

Absolutely. And going off of that: over the course of your life, especially as you went into aerospace and paleomimicry, were you inspired by any particular work of science fiction at any point?

Nathan Pili

Oof. Which work of science fiction was I not inspired by? I guess…

[laughter]

Nathan Pili

I hate to give the standard answer, but Interstellar was a foundational part of my teenage years [laughs] which I feel like every space nerd says. I love Interstellar and The Martian and more recently Project Hail Mary. Oh my God, I've seen that movie twice already, once normally, once in my IMAX.

I adore, like I love the Project Hail Mary book.

And I think it's such a unique story that gets told. I don't know if you guys have seen it yet.

Emily

Not yet! I'm currently reading the book. [laughs]

Alexa

I’m waiting to.  

Nathan Pili

You're reading the book! Okay, nice.

It's crazy how faithful… how well they recreate scenes from the book. It was like seeing a window into my imagination. It was crazy. And the music, oh my God, I could talk about this movie for hours. Because like the team behind it was so passionate and so well built.

But classic sci-fi: I was a big fan of reading Arthur C. Clarke and other old, like old sci-fi stuff like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Olaf Stapleton.

Olaf Stapleton– I don't know if you've heard or read Last and First Men?

Emily

No. 

Nathan Pili

That is a mental work of speculative fiction. It was written in the 30s and it still stands today as the most mental work of fiction because he basically hypothesizes what would the next 80 million years of human life look like. And he predicted World War II, and said, “Oh, if humanity starts killing each other, and they have to migrate to the poles, what does a few million years of humanity living near the poles look like? And how do they then integrate back into normal society?” That kind of thing.

And he just goes into so much detail about both evolution and space travel. But because it's written in the 30s, there is just so many gaps in knowledge. Like he talks about Neptune as being a solid planet because we didn't know they were gas…like the dynamics of gas giants, right? So he talks about humanity like looking for a permanent space to live. To combat overpopulation, they move to Neptune because it's got a big surface area. And I just, I find speculative fiction often more intriguing than raw, hard science fiction.

Alexa

That's awesome. I'll have to check that out. Last and First Men is the title of it? 

Nathan Pili

Yeah.

Alexa

Okay.

Nathan Pili

Yeah. It's a hefty book.

Alexa

Oh, nice. There's definitely a joy in like hard science fiction, but yeah, the speculative stuff, especially written earlier, like you said…

Nathan Pili

Yes!

Alexa

…like when we had that gap in knowledge, it is so much more fascinating to see what people imagined the world would be.

Nathan Pili

Yeah, there's one of Arthur C. Clarke’s books is called The Fall of Moondust, and that takes place on the Moon even before we'd landed on the moon. And he talks about having like, what is the equivalent of a ski resort on the moon. Because in Arthur C. Clarke’s mind, he imagines the moon dust akin to snow and that you could have like jet ski…not jet skis, like wakeboarding on the Moon. He develops this idea of what would downtime look like on the moon.

But we hadn't even been there. We had no idea what the consistency of moon dust was like.

And I just love… I love that people are crazy like that.

Emily

That's so… I'm envisioning somebody in a space suit, skiing or snowboarding.

[laughs]

Nathan Pili

Yeah, exactly.

[laughs]

Alexa

We say this all the time, but genuinely, I feel like we could ask you questions and learn more about paleomimicry and analog astronaut stuff for hours. But we also want to be respectful of your time. Yeah, as we wind down, you know, sort of curious, especially because you had a sort of non-traditional career path to what you're doing now, do you have any advice and or resources that you would like to share for folks who may be interested in biomimicry specifically or aerospace?

Nathan Pili

Yeah, I would say paleomimicry is a difficult one to get into because it's such a new field, right?

People have only recently started looking at this stuff. Biomimicry in general has a lot of YouTube videos about it. I would say there's a wealth of resources out there for biomimicry.

Again, I would say I only immersed myself in the space community when I did my internship for ESA. I only found out about Asclepios from my internship there. And I feel like it changed my trajectory because, when you're a kid, you're like, “I want to be an astronaut.”

And then that gets put to the wayside. But I think when I got to ESA, I was like, “Oh, the space industry is real.”

Because you get so locked into your degree, you forget that people do this for fun. And so I would say, if people wanna get involved in the space industry, there are so many talks and events and internship possibilities in the space sector. And as soon as you're in, you don't get out. You are surrounded by more and more space people and they point you in the right directions.

Biomimicry, I do genuinely feel like it's something you have to stumble into. [laughs] Though I would say I only got into this because of x-rays, because of imaging techniques, right?

And I would say personally, if I was to do my whole university/higher education again, I would try and get into more imaging techniques because imaging techniques are so, like we were talking about earlier, about generalized and specialized. Being good at imaging techniques just makes you a heightened level of generalization because, you know, I've scanned metal powders, dinosaur bones, bird bones, which are completely different in terms of preservation and whatnot amongst titanium, random titanium components, that kind of thing.

And you learn all sorts of skills from an analysis point of view if you get really good at imaging.

So that's a long rambly way to basically say getting into imaging and imaging techniques makes it easier to integrate into other interdisciplinary sectors.

Alexa

And also, if you feel comfortable sharing and you're able to, would you be able to share what you're working on now or any projects that you have upcoming in the near future?

Nathan Pili

Yeah, well, we've finally taken birds a shot. 

Alexa

[laughs]

Nathan Pili

…because when we were publishing our pterosaur paper, Reviewer 2 basically asked, “why didn't you look at birds?” And we basically said, “That's a whole other paper. We'll probably do that.” And now we are doing that. 

[laughs]

Nathan Pili

So we're looking at the dynamics of bird bones. And we've realized that if anything, the metal 3D printing industry is not completely readily equipped to make microstructural accuracy prints. So a lot of what we've been doing at the moment is we've got the biological side, but also we've been pushing the absolute limits of what you can currently do with metal 3D printing. Because we wanted to print these bones that we scanned, these pterosaur bones out of metal, but it just wasn't a possibility because the resolution isn't there. So we've been really pushing those limits as well.

Emily

That's so cool. And then also, as you're working on that, where can folks find you and your work online?

Nathan Pili

Absolutely. Well, you can find me on Google Scholar for my publications and my LinkedIn is also there, where I get up to lots of shenanigans. And yeah, I'm trying to have more of an online presence as I move forward in my career. I need to get one of those LinkedIn translator tools.

I don't know if you've seen those online where you type what you want to say and then it translates it into LinkedIn speak.

If people are super interested in asking me questions, my first author publication with the Terrace of Bones has my e-mail. So you can always find me there.

Emily

Perfect. And we'll make sure to link to those in our show notes on our website, as well as the Asclepios podcast and the Asclepios mission information that we've referenced a couple times.

We'll make sure that those are on the show notes for this episode.

Nathan Pili

Awesome. Yeah, if you guys are interested, the Asclepios mission will have its open day before every mission. I feel like we need to advertise this a lot more in advance personally.

We do this mission in the Swiss Alps every year. And at the start of the mission, we do a massive open day. And so if you guys are interested, you can also find us there with the current astronauts and the current mission control team.

Emily

Perfect! 

Alexa

Very cool.

Emily

Yes, Nathan, thank you so so much for chatting with us today.

This was so much fun!

Alexa

This was so lovely. Thank you so much.

Nathan Pili

Thank you so much, guys. It's been a pleasure.

[interlude music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily

Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Nathan Pili! Since the recording of our interview, Nathan has been selected to be part of the crew for AMADEE-27 in April next year, which is a Mars Analogue mission in Portugal! More information on that will be in our shownotes with the transcript for this episode, and we’ll be sure to share on our socials as well! 

Alexa

As we mentioned, the shownotes for this episode will have links to Nathan’s paper and the mission website for Asclepios and their accompanying podcast. We definitely recommend you check them out! 

Emily

Also, for fans of Project Hail Mary - since the recording of this interview, Alexa and I have now seen the movie multiple times. And there’s more exciting news if you loved the book: Audible just announced a new novella set in the same universe as the novel, titled Exoplanet by Benjamin Percy and Andy Weir. 

Alexa

And finally, if you liked this episode, please share with your friends and leave a rating or review on whichever podcast platform you use to listen. This helps other listeners find our show! While you're browsing, definitely feel free to also check out the Asclepios podcast, and show them some love! 

'Til next time!

Emily

Til next time!

[outro music: “Space” by Music_Unlimited]

Emily Olsen
Next

Episode 19: Breaking Boundaries with South Korea's First Astronaut, Dr. Soyeon Yi